


A Sea of Stars

by eliotthawke



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 15:42:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20245264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eliotthawke/pseuds/eliotthawke
Summary: It's a new school year and another chance for Lando to find a lost treasure; with Alex's (expected) and George's (unexpected) help he roams the castle at night... what could go wrong?or, Lando's family has a dark secret, Alex knows what it is and George can solemnly swear they are up to no good.





	A Sea of Stars

_ We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins _

_ Carbon in our souls and nitrogen in our brains _

_ 93 percent stardust with souls made of flames, _

_ We are all just stars that have people names _

Nikita Gill

Hogwarts at night was a scary thing.

Alex was in his second year, not new anymore, and still the castle during night time scared him. It was more than the knowledge he was breaking the rules, more than whining wing and autumn darkness and rain hitting window panes. Something stronger, a creeping fear that was deep in his bones. 

He walked down the halls and corridors, constantly stopping to check that he was alone, only a wand and a flashlight in his hands. (Yes, Alex was from a wizarding family. His mother was muggle born, though, and often went on “adventures” when she was a kid. All of her friends had these flashlights to explore at night, and now Alex had inherited one. “You might have a wand, but it's wasted as a flashlight,” she would say. And because his mother was never wrong, Alex did not argue.)

Oh, if only she knew what kind of adventure Alex had gotten himself into…

He had reached the spot - in the corridor of the 7th floor, same as always, - only a few moments before 11. There was no one in sight, but Alex still hid behind a statue so if someone was coming, they wouldn't see him right away. 

It seemed like he was there, huddled in the dark, for ages, but a look on his watch told him it had only been twenty minutes. Another ten passed before he heard quiet, familiar steps that announced the moment he had been waiting for. 

“Sorry I'm late,” Alex heard a sheepish whisper and stepped out into the corridor.

“I've been waiting for ages,” he complained, also whispering. The boy in front of him smiled meekly and sent his fingers through his curly hair. 

“I'm always freaking late though! You should already be used to that.” 

Alex pretended to consider it. 

“Nope, still hate it.” 

The other boy grinned in response, and they started down the corridor. The floor tiles were divided in a grid by the moonlight coming through windows to their right, and rain was still knocking on the glass. The boys were used to sneaking around during the night, so their steps were almost inaudible, even when it wasn’t raining outside.

The patch of wall they stopped in front of might have looked just like ones next to it, but both boys knew all too well what was behind it. They closed their eyes and walked past it back and forth, thrice, perfectly in sync from countless times they'd done this.

The Room of Requirement materialized.

The boys looked at each other, as if to say, "well, here we go again", and Alex reached for the polished handle when another voice broke the silence.

"You idiots know you're going to get caught one day, right?"

The voice was that of a boy, not a teacher, but that didn't mean they weren't in trouble. Slowly, they turned.

"Well, well. Lando Norris and Alexander Albon." The kid was taller than Alex, but he recognized him. A Slytherin from their year.

"What do you want?"Lando asked somewhat cautiously. The kid casually leaned on the wall next to him, his face neutral, and there was no telling whether he was friend or foe.

"More interestingly, what do  _ you two  _ want?" he cocked his head to the side. "Showing up here every week... Looking for something?"

Alex felt chills down his spine and he knew Lando was feeling the same. What did he know, this Slytherin kid? How did he track them down? What if he was connected to The Thing?

(It was not actually called that. It wasn't even Alex's idea and when Lando had told him they were calling it  _ The Thing _ Alex had thought he had been kidding. Lando, however, was not, and had explained that it was too dangerous to say its name out loud. And he wanted to be able to discuss it around other people, so Alex bedgrudgingly had agreed.)

Looking at the Slytherin kid proved useless, not a crack in his cool demeanor. Alex tried to keep his own voice even when he spoke.

"That's none of your business."

"You're right. It's not," the boy suddenly agreed. "But I want in. I could be useful."

Alex and Lando exchanged a look and in his best friend's eyes Alex saw what he was thinking himself: no way. This was serious business, and this guy didn't know what he was getting himself into.

"This isn't a chess club, and we're not sending out invites," Lando said, and if he sounded a little blunt, Alex didn't blame him. He was guarding something that was bigger than them. And now Alex was responsible for this secret, too.

"You should really go back to your dorm,"Alex said, trying to smooth out Lando's hostility, and thought his attempt was in vain when the boy's eyes flashed dangerously. A thought crossed Alex's mind that he was going to blackmail them into telling him the truth, or something like that, but the boy only nodded and before any of them said another word, he stepped back and disappeared into the shadows.

* * *

For a moment they stood in the seventh floor hallway silently. The tapestry behind them was not making any noise for once -  Barnabas the Barmy was gone, and the trolls were asleep. Alex remembered one of the first times they had come here, and the painting had scared the life out of Lando because the trolls had been breathing really loudly in their sleep. The snoring noise had since then become an inside joke, and many months had passed. 

They went through the door, Alex in front with his flashlight and Lando in the rear with his wand - and stopped at the entrance. They could never help it - the Room was so gigantic it never failed to blow their minds. 

“Imagine how much stuff there was before the war,” Lando said quietly. Everyone knew that the Room burned down in the Battle of Hogwarts over 20 years ago, but exactly a year later it was there again, and in the time that passed it filled up with things as if no fire took place.

“Yeah,” Alex agreed, looking up. You could barely see the ceiling, towers of random objects were piling up and obscuring it. 

“When I was little, my brother told me there was a pool in the Room and he had a swim in it,” Lando giggled, shook his head. “I believed him, but he was probably lying.”

“The Room can be anything you want,” Alex said and scratched his head - Herbology class earlier in the day had him digging out dirt from every crevice and there was no time for showering today. “Maybe it turned into a swimming pool for him.”

“Maybe we should have it turn into a swimming pool!” Lando took the lead, stepping to the left of the entrance, and looked back to smile at Alex. “Why does it always have to be the place with no walls and scary stuff in every corner?”

“Yeah no, thanks,” with a huff of laughter, Alex lightly shoved Lando ahead. “I get like, a fight or flight response when I pass this place, I don’t think I could relax if it turned into an entire amusement park.”

“A what?” Lando stopped, face scrunched up in confusion. Alex sighed - a pureblood, Lando didn’t know a lot of things that were common knowledge in the muggle world. 

“It’s, um, it’s like a park but you can go on crazy rides, and there’s junk food everywhere, and…” Alex realized that his explanation wasn’t making any sense to someone who’s never seen it, and decided to stop. “I’ll show you a picture someday.”

They walked in silence for a little bit, then Lando stopped again. 

“But if you asked the Room to turn into an… amusement park?.. would it know what you want?” 

Alex glanced at his watch. 

“I swear to God, Lando. You were half an hour late, then that kid held us up… it’s almost midnight and we haven’t even reached the place where we left off last time.”

“I can walk and talk at the same time,” Lando said and pouted, pretending to be offended. There was a statue of a mermaid right behind him that Alex thought was making the exact same face Lando was. He rushed forward, not wanting to look at it, and Lando skipped - skipped! - next to him. 

“It would turn into anything I want,” Alex said, not sounding like he was fully sure. “I have it in my head, right, what I want it to be. The Room doesn’t need to know what it looks like. Only I do.”

They turned at an intersection between several isles, and Lando lifted his wand to leave a glowing rune on the nearest shelf - a sign so they wouldn’t get lost. 

“Well then, next time we come here, we’re making it an amusement park first.”

Both erupting into giggles, they hurried down the dark aisle side by side. 

* * *

They were far out in the western corner of the Room of Requirement, an hour or two later and too deep into their search to bother with conversation, when Lando turned to face Alex and spoke.

"Do you think that Slytherin kid will tell on us?"

Alex stopped rummaging through a cupboard of empty boxes to look at him.

"He can't go to the teachers right now, he'll be caught out under curfew himself," he pondered it, then added,"and he's too smart for that. Going to them tomorrow morning is pointless, there's no proof."

Lando's grey eyes shone worriedly in the dim flashlight glow. He was clearly not convinced.

"But we do this every week, and he knows that. They just have to leave someone in the corridor outside, and we're done for."

Alex sighed and put down a chain of rusty keys he had fished out of one of the boxes.

"We change the day every week, though. And no one's going to sit outside the Room of Requirement for a week straight because of a student's tale."

Lando looked calmer then, wrinkles on his forehead smoothed out and he returned to going through a drawer of smelly, dusty papers. And then, they heard it: a steady, low hiss coming from Alex's cupboard. Their eyes met, wide with horror, and they turned to face it.

"It" turned out to be a purple gas coming out of the last box left on the shelves, a small carved wooden container that emitted the smoke. Alex jumped away, not eager to find out what it does when it gets to him, and Lando followed suit. They crowded together at the end of the short isle with their wands out, piles of forbidden, hidden and forgotten things towering over them. Alex lifted his flashlight, and they saw the purple mist gathering on the floor, growing thicker.

"We have to do something!" Lando hissed. They both needed to come back another night and continue the search, which meant disabling any dangers they come across as opposed to running from them.

"Dude, what if it's poison?" Alex was ready to get away from the gas first and think of solutions second.

"More reason to neutralize it!"

"We don't even know what it does! How exactly would we know how to neutralize it?"

Lando took a deep breath, looking determined.

"So we find out what it does."

"Oh, go ahead and be my guest," Alex waved his flashlight hand, sending the beam of light all over the place. It ran over the smoke that was swirling in circles now, bigger every second. Lando huffed.

"How are you a Gryffindor and I'm a Hufflepuff?" he wondered, rolling up his sleeves with clear intention of living up to his words. Alex wanted to stop him, but before he got the chance to, there was a flash of white, an echoing clapping noise, and the smoke crawled back towards the cupboard. It flowed back in its container and disappeared from view, the lid snapped shut. The hissing stopped.

A moment of stunned silence later, and a boy's head appeared out of the darkness behind the cupboard.

"Told you I could be useful."

"And I told you we're not hiring," Lando responded. Alex saw he was trying to look cool and calm and not like they were just panicking because of a little smoke and discussing the person they were now talking to. He thought Lando was doing a great job.

"But it's your luck I didn't listen," the Slytherin kid said. He stepped into the light, and Alex noticed drops of sweat on his forehead. "That thing would knock you out for hours, and if you keep breathing it you go into a coma."

Lando, still looking as nonchalant as he could be, nodded.

"So how did you know what to do with it?"

"I know a lot of stuff," the boy said somewhat darkly. "Still convinced you don't want me around?"

Alex and Lando exchanged another look. This time they seemed to be in agreement as well: this kid didn't rat them out, but he  _ did _ save them and was following them around anyway. 

Lando looked back at the boy, a circle of light shaking around the Slytherin's face, and stretched out a hand. Not a moment later, the kid took it.

"You know our names," Alex said, offering his own hand. "What's yours?"

"George. George Russell," he said, and looked uncertain, vulnerable all of a sudden. His big eyes shifted nervously from Alex to Lando and back.

And it was a familiar last name, no doubt, but Alex knew better than to judge people by their family's deeds. So he smiled a little as George took his hand and hoped he didn't think him a coward because of his shaky fingers. George shook it, his own hand steady, and smiled back, a little shy and unsure. Alex knew the feeling - the joy of being accepted, he was there once, too. And standing in a narrow corridor in the Room of Requirement, he felt his world grow just a little bit bigger. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to my wonderful beta  Malter your help is very appreciated 🖤


End file.
